


Antibody Response

by jarofbeees, Recourse



Series: Oncoviridae [2]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Depression, F/F, Medical Trauma, Trauma, Violence, they're more exes than anything but tagging it as a ship is the most logical thing here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-02
Updated: 2018-04-02
Packaged: 2019-04-17 04:57:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14181198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jarofbeees/pseuds/jarofbeees, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Recourse/pseuds/Recourse
Summary: Three years after the end of Overwatch, Angela's struggling to work in international aid without succumbing to burnout.The last thing she expects is her former lover to show up and offer her a job.





	Antibody Response

Angela knelt down in front of a dirty, pale child, no more than six or seven by her estimation. His father looked anxiously down at her as she told him to open his mouth, stick his tongue out, look into the light she shined in his eyes. Even in the blistering heat of the Outback, he shivered under her gaze, eyes glassy and unresponsive.

Angela rose to her feet carefully, back aching. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said cautiously, looking into the father’s eyes with deep pity. “He’ll have to go into quarantine with us. He has it too. Have you been feeling ill at all?”

“A bit,” he admitted, taking his child’s hand. “Should I…?”

Angela looked back behind her, at the mass of white tents with the Crisis Control emblem on their sides, and did a quick mental calculation. Based on the day’s intake, the amount of people coming in…

“We can only take the particularly vulnerable right now — the young and elderly, or people with complicating health conditions,” Angela told him. “I’m sorry, I wish—”

“You’re doing everything you can,” he said, holding up a hand. “I couldn’t take care of him myself, we can barely get food right now as it is.”

“I wish we could do more,” Angela told him. “We’re trying to synthesize a cure, an antiviral I designed, but...funding’s an issue. It’s all we can to do maintain quarantine, treat the symptoms and help people through it, if they can survive.”

“I’ll stay inside, see if my neighbors will help out so I don’t spread it. Junker flu’s no joke,” the father said solemnly. “Eddie, go with the nice lady, okay? She’ll make sure you get better.”

“We’ll let you know if anything changes, sir.” Angela looked down to Eddie, reaching out her hand. His eyes barely registered the movement. Angela saw in him every symptom of the late stages of the radiation-mutated plague that had been a problem in the Outback since the explosion of the Omnium, saw the chances of his survival as crisp low percentage points over his head. Numbers, everything was always numbers; survival rates, patient capacities, budgets in red.

She took his hand and led him away, found him a bed in the sickrooms. She went into her own tent to enter him into the system. Another doctor spotted her through the open flap and rushed over to her, a frown on her face.

“Doctor Ziegler, you’re not supposed to be on duty,” she chided. “You told me yourself—”

“I know what I said, Amy, but someone needs to run intake and Abdul’s gotten sick himself at this point,” Angela snapped. “Either I work or the work builds up.”

“You’re going to hurt yourself. We both know the strain on your muscles from the implant—”

A horrid, choking cry sounded from the tent behind her, and Amy cursed. “We’re not done with this talk,” she warned, waggling a finger in the air. “Tonight we’re going to scan you again.”

“Amy,” Angela groaned, but she was already off, looking for the patient who was almost certainly dead. That noise had become familiar by now; a patient’s lungs completely seizing, going stiff, their last futile efforts to breathe ringing out through the camp. Twenty-five percent. That was the fatality rate even with the best rest and care they could provide here. The rest would recover, despite the tense weeks they spent on the edge of that final gasp, walk out of the camps and return to life, leaving a quarter of their fellows behind in pauper’s graves in the dusty, irradiated Outback soil.

Angela tried to turn her focus back to the terminal, to her inbox, looking for news. Another grant denied. No money in saving a bunch of scavenging outlaws that weren’t even officially Australian citizens. ‘No guarantee of success’, that’s what they always claimed. Fools. None of the people looking over Angela’s work were real scientists or engineers, just accountants and politicians. Her design for the antiviral was based directly on the machine buried in her back, a carefully modified nanostream, something anyone could print in a university laboratory and ship here with no effort. It would _work._ If someone who’d worked in Overwatch, who’d been healed by a Caduceus generator, took one look—

But Overwatch was long over, and Angela was scrabbling madly to find even a scrap of the respect and confidence she’d once commanded there. Staring at her screen made her want to stand, walk out to the scrapyards behind the CC camp, and lie down in the dirt with the dead.

She closed out of her inbox, covering her eyes with her hand. Her gaze flitted to the suitcase by her feet, the vials of green solution and syringes waiting within. She could keep working for just a while longer. Amy’s weekly dose date for Angela wasn’t _that_ far off, and her body itched for Moira’s formula. What harm would it do if—

Suddenly, the thrum of powerful hoverengines sounded overhead, as though a gunship were hanging above the camp. Angela’s nerves flared, remembering battles, and she quickly grabbed the pistol from the holster on her hip and jumped out of her tent, scanning the skies. But what she saw in the air was no weapon.

It was gold, rounded, a shuttle bearing the distinctive architectural flair of Oasis. Angela blinked as it set down in the center of the camp, like it belonged there. She hadn’t sent any requests that way. Everyone knew Oasis was a cloister of scientists working for themselves, advancing the work without care to application; they didn’t spread any of their findings out of Oasis unless _they_ saw fit. Angela’s heart pounded in her chest as staff members poked their heads out of the sickrooms to stare at the newcomers, even as a loading ramp extended from the bottom of the shuttle.

Angela looked around, noticed that no one seemed interested in approaching the thing, and held her head high. She stuffed her pistol back into its holster, keeping her back straight as she walked despite the growing ache. Whatever this was, she’d face it head-on.

But when Moira O’Deorain walked out of the shuttle, she stopped dead in her tracks.

Her outfit was so ostentatious that Angela hardly recognized her but for the short, gelled red hair. Whites and purples, exposed shoulders, and some strange device resting on her back, connected to heavy gauntlets by tubes and wiring streaming down the outfit. Moira looked at Angela, and that familiar sharp face broke out in a wide smile.

“Angela, darling!” she called, stepping off the ramp and waving a hand in the air. The shuttle seemed to take off by itself, heaving into the sky and flying off somewhere behind a hill of scrap. “So lovely to see you!”

Angela was rooted to the ground. It’d been a lifetime since she last saw Moira, since the words _tying up loose ends_ had started rattling in her skull. It all came pulsing back to her, the injury that had paralyzed her, Moira’s creation of a spinal implant to save her, the turbulent partnership in Japan that had lead to some of their best work, the sexual tension that had flared into something dark and twisted and sick between them until it all came crashing down with Reyes’ death and the dismantling of Blackwatch. Moira had only ever called her _Angela_ once before, in the heat of passion and drunken self-hatred.

“Well, don’t rush to greet me all at once,” Moira said with a smirk, walking up to Angela and cocking her hip.

“What are you _doing_ here?” Angela asked, taking a step back.

“Hardly a way to say hello to an old colleague, my dear,” Moira said, putting a hand to her chest in offense. “Doesn’t our history mean anything to you?”

“Our _history?_ ” Angela hissed. “Our _history’s_ a—” She spotted Amy out of the corner of her eye, staring at the two of them with great confusion written across her features. Angela sighed. “We are not doing this here,” she stated, glancing about and looking at everyone watching the proceedings. “Come with me. Now.”

“Oh, very well, if we can’t have a civil discussion,” Moira sighed. “Lead on, then.”

Angela turned on her heel and quickly started to head out of the camp, back towards the scrapyards where the towers of rusting metal might hide them from curious eyes and ears. Not looking at Moira helped. Her hands clenched into tight fists at her sides as she stalked, snapping at anyone who stared to get back to work as she passed by. Moira took it all with a raised eyebrow, a wry glance, that attitude of hers apparently still intact despite the years. Angela looked straight ahead until they were nearly to the graves, stopping only when they’d reached a dead end in the scrapper’s paths.

She whirled around and faced Moira, a scowl on her lips. “What are you doing here?” she asked again.

“Well, Angela—”

“It’s _Doctor,_ ” Angela interrupted, folding her arms.

Moira raised an eyebrow. “Very well, Doctor. As I was saying, I’ve heard of your work since the end of our former employer. You’re getting a bit of a reputation for being...difficult.”  
  
Angela couldn’t help but laugh. “You’re one to talk,” she accused.

“Make no mistake, it is no insult. You’re as persistent and doggedly determined as you ever were. I’ve looked over the grant proposals you’ve been flinging about.” Moira folded her arms. “Your design. It’ll work. Should you have the funding.”

Angela should’ve been jumping with joy. She should’ve been ecstatic that anyone would want to fund her, to help Crisis Control get a footing in the Outback and really start making a difference. But something about this didn’t feel right.

“Oasis wants to donate to Crisis Control?” Angela asked doubtfully.

“You misunderstand. This isn’t for Crisis Control _._ This is an offer of employment.” Moira smiled at her. “You would join us, we’d take control of this operation, and bring a small outreach team into the Outback. To deal with the junker flu.”

“What? What do you get out of that?”

“The progression of science, of course. I have several ideas for what this population could prove for us on a larger scale.” Moira paced the small path, just like she used to do in the lab. “Imagine, Doctor — we could start modifying this population to better survive their environment. Their susceptibility to this plague is a consequence of the low-level radiation sickness most everyone in the region is afflicted with — surely you know this. What if we could modify their genetics, produce a hardier generation that could resist radiation and the virus alike? Your antiviral nanostream, it could be the key to something far greater.”

Angela considered for a moment. It sounded good, but then she thought deeper, remembered Moira’s methods, and balked.

“You’re going to use the Outback as a human petri dish,” she said, taking a step away from Moira. “You want me to start modifying their genetics on the fly, sending them off into an uncontrolled environment—”

“To improve their lives, darling. How else are we supposed to see the effects firsthand without experimentation?”

“We can’t run live experiments on human subjects!” Angela argued back. “This is _exactly_ why—”

“Darling,” Moira crooned, reaching over and lifting Angela’s chin to face her. There was something sticking out of the back of that palm, a metal tube laid over Moira’s hand. Angela jerked her head away, but Moira continued. “This place is a waste. Surely you’ve seen that. It’s violent, ill-mannered, filthy, and full of decay and disease. What harm can we possibly do to it that’d make any difference? By contrast, what could we do to _improve_ it? With you in charge of our operations in this area, we could—”

“ _No,_ Moira,” Angela snapped. “You have no authority to be here.”

“On the contrary, the Australian government and Oasis have reached a rather agreeable accord as of this afternoon,” Moira corrected her, putting her hands behind her back. “Angela, I came here myself to inform you first, because I respect you. We did great work together, once. Crisis Control may not be here any longer, but I know you. You’d want to stay, and complete your work.”

Angela’s head spun. “We’re being kicked out?” she breathed. “But—”

“Oasis has considerably more resources and it won’t cost Australia a thing. Why wouldn’t they take our offer?” Moira asked with a chuckle. Her face fell, then, and she looked down at Angela with a surprisingly open expression. “Why wouldn’t you?”

“This is against every standard of medical ethics!” Angela objected. “How could they just—”

“It’s a new age, Angela. A time for new standards, new ideas. _Progress._ The essence of science. You were on that front, once. Do you really want to remain behind, scrambling to pick up the past?” Moira asked. “This is where it begins. A genetic revolution, a reforging of the human race. Our successors already exist. The omnics, by right, ought to be alone on this planet; they are the fitter species. If we wish to continue existing, we must improve ourselves. Surely you see that. Surely you _feel_ it. On your back is the proof.”

Angela reached back to the top of the implant, just below her hairline. Her mouth felt dry. Moira’s work. “It’s not like it’s perfect,” she spat. “It’s been getting worse.”

Moira’s eyebrows shot up. “Really?”

“My back aches constantly again, like when I was first recovering. Ever since I stopped putting on the Valkyrie suit, I’ve been degrading.”

“If you joined us, I could take a look,” Moira urged. “Perhaps we could develop a maintenance schedule for it, or improve upon it, together—”

“I am never working with you again, Moira. That’s final. What you’re planning to do here is wrong and I intend to fight you every step of the way on it, do you hear me?”

Moira’s eyes darkened. “...Was it truly so terrible?” she asked, her voice surprisingly soft.

Angela hated it. Hated how arrogant and blind and God-damned _certain_ she was of everything, her ego and attitude and everything that had once attracted Angela to Moira now turning to ash in her mouth. “You threw me away like garbage!” she shouted. “You left me crying in your room because _you_ couldn’t handle what we had!”

“We both...made mistakes, Angela,” Moira admitted, looking away. “But I’ve come to find that mistakes can be opportunities. A valuable lesson.”

“What are you talking about?” Angela asked. “Your first mistake and you completely shut down, turned into a—”

“This. On my back, in my hands.” Moira raised her arms. “Reyes didn’t die, Angela. I’ve learned...much, from his condition. We’ve been working together for some time now. Outside of Oasis’ knowledge.”

“He’s alive?” Angela whispered. Moira nodded solemnly.

“I have investments in many places. Many tools to fund my research, spur my knowledge. Oasis is merely one. Other organizations have proven to be receptive to my talents, unsavory as they may have once seemed.”

Angela took a step back. “Who else are you working with?” she asked, shaking, a hand hovering over her pistol.

“The organization matters less than the work. Surely you—”

“Who else?” Angela demanded, gripping her weapon tight, ready to pull it. The sick feeling in her stomach writhed within her. “You think I didn’t hear the rumors? You think I didn’t hear about Talon’s smoke-monster agent?”

“Talon is merely a tool—”

Years of fighting caught up to Angela in an instant, made her raise her weapon and point it right at Moira’s face. Moira froze, staring down the barrel of the gun.

“I wouldn’t do that, dear,” she said softly. “This needn’t come to—”

“You aren’t going to get away with this,” Angela said, shaking. “You can’t. I won’t let you. I won’t let you come in here and turn my life upside-down again for your own, your own twisted ideas of progress. Not again.”

“Angela—”

“Stop calling me that!” Angela hissed. “Stop it!”

“You don’t have any authority to arrest me. If you care so much about ethics, consider that,” Moira warned. “Either you stop this foolishness right now, or you commit murder. Those are the options you’ve apparently given yourself.”

“We worked to fight Talon together,” Angela said, shaking. “You turned around and betrayed—”

“Overwatch blacked my name out of the records! They denied me access to my own work, nearly destroyed my career! What was I to do, Ziegler?” Moira demanded. “Without Talon, Oasis wouldn’t have taken a second look at me. Now I am finally achieving my dream to improve humankind, and what are you doing? _Cleanup work._ It doesn’t suit you.”

“I’m trying to help people. I can’t let you use them like you used me,” Angela growled. “I know what you do to people, Moira. I won’t let it happen.”

“So you’ll shoot me, then?” Moira let loose a condescending laugh. “Oh, the mighty Angel of Mercy, fallen so far. You like to think you’re so much better than me, but your superiority complex is just a mask for your lack of vision, as always. Go on, then, if you truly believe—”

Angela pulled the trigger.

Moira stumbled back with a cry, even as Angela shook, realizing what she’d just done. She’d missed. A graze, just under Moira’s eye, oozing blood. Moira put her hand over it, coming away with a sticky palm and a deadly calm expression.

“I told you,” she rasped, raising herself back to her full height. “I learned much from Reyes.” And with no warning, as Angela was still reeling from the shock of her own actions, Moira thrust out her left hand. Violet tendrils of light shot from the gauntlet and wrapped themselves around Angela’s chest, crackling across her flesh, a hauntingly familiar sensation as they scorched across her skin and left waves of dead gray flesh in their wake. The pain forced her to her knees, gasping for air as Moira grinned wolfishly.

And then, something happened to Moira’s face. Where the graze once wept blood, it started to heal over — and then, it boiled and ruptured, expanding into a horrific patch of bubbling flesh across her entire eye socket. She screamed, and the drain on Angela stopped as she too fell to the ground, grasping at her head.

Angela coughed, looking up. “Bloody prototypes,” Moira cursed, covering the wound with a hand.

Angela hacked out a bitter laugh, her voice weak as she said, “Human experimentation again, Moira?”

Moira chuffed, rising back to her feet. “It’s no matter,” she murmured to herself, reaching behind her and twisting off some part of the pack on her back. “Disable the regeneration and it won’t affect me. Only you.”

Angela tried to rise to her feet, but Moira was already on her again, a hand fitting around her throat and lifting her up, pressing her back into the sharp mound of scrap behind her.

“You’ll be a husk,” Moira hissed as the pack started to tick up again, the gauntlet humming to life. “As you are now, but your pathetic condition will be made _physical._ You won’t stand in my way.”

Angela tried to claw at the arm holding her up, but the scorchmarks left by the first drain flared in pain whenever she tried to move, burnt out muscles refusing to budge. The pistol dropped from her hand, and all she could think to do was spit in Moira’s face.

“I can’t believe I ever loved you,” she hissed, and Moira’s eyes went wide.

The gauntlet flared to life, and Angela couldn’t even cry out as the violet tendrils crawled across her neck, choking her out. But Moira seemed frozen, just staring as she died, even as something started to whistle and scream, something mechanical, something—

The gauntlet exploded.

Moira let out a horrifying screech, dropping Angela and falling back, clutching her hand as it shriveled into a limp gray mass of charred flesh. Angela lay on her back, rusted metal digging into her spine as she stared on, immobile, vision fading.

 _I’m dying,_ she thought. _I’m dying because of Moira._

It made sense, in the oddest way.

But even as Moira cradled her destroyed limb and moaned, Angela felt a surge from her back. Moira looked up, staring at Angela as yellow waves started to wrack her body, erupting from her skin’s every pore, heat flaring in the implant.

“Of course,” Moira managed through a sobbing laugh. “Of course.”

Angela felt herself regenerating, the flesh that had been turned grey suddenly filling with blood and strength again, and she gasped as her throat opened up once more, coughing.

“My emergency protocol,” Moira said. “If the implant detected fatal damage. A one-charge battery hidden in the chassis, a surge of recuperative energy in case you were about to die. I never told you about it. Didn’t want you to get reckless. Naturally it would save you now.”

Angela could only cough, even as she rolled over and scrabbled frantically for her dropped pistol. Moira rose clumsily to her feet, her left hand limp at her side as she pressed a finger to her ear.

“Extract me. _Now,_ ” she ordered as Angela grabbed the gun and rose to her feet. No. No, she couldn’t get away, but Moira was running through the yard, cradling her hand, fingers flopping grotesquely with each step. Angela’s feet weren’t sure or steady, lagging behind as Moira stumbled towards the edge of the yard, as the hoverengines of the shuttle roared overhead. When she had a clear shot, Moira was already struggling up the loading ramp, and Angela’s arms were still limp and uncertain, only a few shots _pinging_ off the outside of the vehicle before the ramp folded up and the shuttle shot into the sky.

Angela collapsed, her energy spent despite the best efforts of the implant.

Amy found her there, at the edge of the junkyard, the day the soldiers came.


End file.
